I didn't set out to start a community. I set out to remember myself.
It happened in the middle of a 28-hour PICU shift. I had just intubated a baby. The adrenaline was making me sick and I slipped into the call room. I sat on that twin bed, staring at the blank wall in the pitch black. I felt hollow in a way I couldn’t name. In that moment, it hit me that I was finally a doctor. I thought about who I was when I wasn’t charting, rounding, and calling consults. The unsettling truth rolled in: I had no idea who I was outside of medicine.
So I did the most millennial thing imaginable. I pulled out my phone and googled: “how to find myself – woman.”
That search led me to an unexpected doorway: The Wild Woman Project and a mountaintop retreat with 150 women. I went. It was nothing like the conferences that I had been to before. There, I found something medicine had pressed out of me—safe space, honest reflection, belly laughs, and women holding space for each other without trying to "fix it". I learned to sit with grief and gratitude at the same time. I learned that being “the strong one” is not the same as being whole. And I learned that healing is so much easier when you’re not doing it alone.
Those experiences pulled me through some of the hardest chapters of my life—navigating narcolepsy while working nights, infertility, pediatric death-induced anxiety, and the disorienting sense of being needed by everyone while feeling unknown to myself. That’s when the seed for Women Physicians Collective (WPC) took root: a physicians-only space where we reconnect to self, purpose, and one another.
Because women heal in community.
And healers deserve healing, too.
Why Community Matters
Medicine trains us to postpone our needs. Eat later. Sleep later. Feel later. Repeat.
Over time, “later” becomes a life. The result is disconnection—from self, loved ones, purpose, and joy.
Community isn’t a soft extra. It’s protective. Human nervous systems settle in safe company. We think more clearly. We remember we’re not the only one. We take off the mask when we feel safe and can breathe like a person again.
For women physicians, the context is specific. We’re not just carrying patients and teams. We’re carrying identities, families, fertility decisions, and relentless expectations—spoken and unspoken. A gender-responsive, physicians-only community that integrates all specialties and focuses on both professional and (arguably more importantly) personal topics gives us what traditional spaces often can’t: a head start. We don’t have to translate acronyms or explain why the charting still isn’t done or why 2 a.m. feels like noon in our bones. We don't have to focus only on work, professionalism, "the next promotion", more, more, more.
We get to start at real. And we get to talk about it all.
Back to that night...
I can still see the glow of my phone on that call-room bed. The search results. The tiny thought, “What if I tried something completely different?”
That one yes moved me from numb to present. From white-knuckling my way through and going through the motions…to actually feeling my life again.
It also planted the seed for my current mission: Create the space I needed back then—specifically for women physicians.
So I trained. I studied. I started facilitating women's circles. I held space for women through infertility (myself included), through career changes, shifts, and frustrations. Through relationship ups and downs. Through happiness, joy, wins, rememberings, reclaimings. And now it's time to do it for us.
So the truth I carry now is simple: You don’t have to do this alone.
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Women Physicians Collective
is a physicians-only membership designed to move you from disconnected → reconnected without adding another heavy lift to your calendar.
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You’ll find:
- Community (Physicians-Only). Monthly pop-ups (circles, guest speakers, experiential workshops), a private community space, mentorship + networking, and a growing resource library.
- CME + Community (Physicians-Only). Everything above, plus women’s-health CME credits (live + on-demand) with certificates delivered to your inbox—so your professional development nourishes your life, too.
Our rhythm fits a real physician schedule: one live CME (45–60 minutes), one pop-up experience, and one simple toolkit each month—replays included for call weeks and life weeks. No guilt. No “falling behind.” Just consistent touchpoints that add energy instead of draining it.
Nov 1: Waitlist opens for the annual membership!
Join our newsletter, Notes from the Call Room, for stories, shifts, + soul medicine.
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WISE WORDS FROM WILD WOMEN
An excerpt from Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”
Sometimes poetry says it better than any pep talk ever could. This one’s for the days you feel heavy, guilty, or not enough.
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Stay wild,
✨JMac✨
Jessica M. McIntyre, MD, FAAP
Founder, Women Physicians Collective
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